Last year Hrayr used convolutional networks to identify spoken language from short audio recordings for a TopCoder contest and got 95% accuracy. After the end of the contest we decided to try recurrent neural networks and their combinations with CNNs on the same task. The best combination allowed to reach 99.24% and an ensemble of 33 models reached 99.67%. This work became Hrayr’s bachelor’s thesis.

Recently we have implemented Dynamic memory networks in Theano and trained it on Facebook’s bAbI tasks which are designed for testing basic reasoning abilities. Our implementation now solves 8 out of 20 bAbI tasks which is still behind state-of-the-art. Today we release a web application for testing and comparing several network architectures and pretrained models.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has organized a 4 month contest in Kaggle on question answering. The aim is to create a system which can correctly answer the questions from the 8th grade science exams of US schools (biology, chemistry, physics etc.). DeepHack Lab organized a scientific school + hackathon devoted to this contest in Moscow. Our team decided to use this opportunity to explore the deep learning techniques on question answering (although they seem to be far behind traditional systems). We tried to implement Dynamic memory networks described in a paper by A. Kumar et al. Here we report some preliminary results. In the next blog post we will describe the techniques we used to get to top 5% in the contest.

Recently TopCoder announced a contest
to identify the spoken language in audio recordings. I decided to test how well
deep convolutional networks will perform on this kind of data. In short I managed to get
around 95% accuracy and finished at the 10th place. This post reveals all the details.